'Since 2009, Australian author David Malouf’s texts have been included and then excluded from key courses in Indian universities. Malouf’s place in the curriculum (particularly that of An Imaginary Life [1978]) relates to pedagogical and intellectual negotiations with postcolonial theory – especially debates about the inclusion of white settler literatures. It also should be seen in the context of the country’s emergent (hyper)nationalist political imagination. Referring to the influential course “New Literatures in English” offered by University of Delhi’s English department, this article argues that the selection of Malouf texts by Indian English departments indicates not only ongoing debates in postcolonial thought, but also a preference for postcolonial texts that can be read through essentializing lenses. It proposes Malouf’s later novel Remembering Babylon (1993) as a productive text through which to discuss the limitations of using deterministic cultural markers in the creation of a postcolonial Indian imaginary.' (Publication abstract)

'This study aims to foreground key literary works in Persian and Australian culture that deal with the representation of exile and dislocation. Through cultural and literary analysis, Dislocation, Writing, and Identity in Australian and Persian Literature investigates the influence of dislocation on self-perception and the remaking of connections both through the act of writing and the attempt to transcend social conventions. Examining writing and identity in David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life (1978), Iranian Diaspora Literature, and Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women Without Men (1989/ Eng.1998), Hasti Abbasi provides a literary analysis of dislocation, with its social and psychological manifestations. Abbasi reveals how the exploration of exile/dislocation, as a narrative that needs to be investigated through imagination and meditation, provides a mechanism for creative writing practice.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'Story-telling, the pleasure of sitting in close company and listening to a story, allowing oneself to float free in the moment and enter, both in the senses and in imagination, into the story's events so that the story becomes our own, must be one of the oldest and earliest of our pleasures - a function of that uniquely human faculty in us, the capacity to step beyond the actual into the possible.' (Introduction)

'According to Said, exile is a condition of terminal loss, "an unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home," which involves "the crippling sorrow of estrangement" (173). According to Homi Bhabha, "colonial mimicry is, among other things, the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite" (86). [...]Ovid needs to integrate himself with the other to experience a meaningful life and sense of belonging. According to Robert Massey and Khawla Abu-Baker, "The I of each person actively coordinates the me into a self-image based on past and present experiences and future anticipations of self with others" (14).' (Publication abstract)